Top Fakes of the Week about Ukraine

A doctored photo of Ukrainian servicemen allegedly transporting stolen cattle was spread on Russian and separatist social networks and blogs.

The photo initially appeared on June 20 on the website of the Russian channel Zvezda. It gave Svodki ot opolchenia Novorossii as the source, which stated that Ukrainian servicemen had allegedly stolen cattle from the inhabitants of the so-called “Luhansk People’s Republic”.

Later the falsified photo was removed from the site and from Zvezda’s social networks, but remained in the cache on the page Vkontakte.

Dumskaya website published the original photo of Ukrainian servicemen in October 2014. It had been taken in Odesa region, where cadets from the local military academy were training in carrying fellow soldiers and equipment.

On June 7, Russian television channel Lifenews ran a piece called “Enrichment in a Kyiv Way,” during which it falsely reported that Ukrainian mobile operators inform on seizing property and charge the mobile accounts of residents of the so-called “Luhansk People’s Republic” for the needs of the anti-terrorist operation.

Representatives of the mobile operator life:) have denied their involvement in the SMS campaign. The press office of the company informed that all official text messages are delivered with the official way of writing of the brand, that is with the smiley and lower case letter — life:).

Kyivstar press service informed that the mobile operator only uses its brand name “Kyivstar” when sending text messages. Moreover, Kyivstar does not serve customers in the temporarily occupied regions of Donetsk and Luhansk regions at all. By the way, there is a spelling mistake in the text of the message — the word “принадлежит” was written as “прЕнадлежит”.